ChatGPT Agent

Why Is ChatGPT Agent On My Website?

People turn to agent mode when they want AI to do things online, not just talk about them. Instead of copying links or switching between tabs, users can hand ChatGPT a task like “book my hotel,” “compare three products,” or “find me the best deal on these shoes,” and the agent carries out those steps in a browser on their behalf.

Right now, that process isn’t faster than a human; it’s more about convenience, curiosity, and proof-of-concept. But the underlying capability is improving quickly. As agents gain speed, reliability, and integration depth, they’ll begin completing complex tasks at super-human pace and scale, giving users a new level of convenience and delegation in web interactions.

From a site’s perspective, that means that a visit from ChatGPT Agent is still driven by human-intent, but the execution is handled by automation. 

Common use cases for ChatGPT Agent include:

• Research and Information Gathering: Users requesting up-to-date information or detailed analysis of a problem.
  

• Agentic Commerce Activities: Shopping, price comparisons, and potential purchases on behalf of users.
  

• Form Completion: Filling out applications, bookings, or registrations
  

• Multi-Step Workflows: Complex tasks requiring navigation across multiple pages or systems

Key Security Concerns for ChatGPT Agent

Agentic systems blur the line between user and automation. ChatGPT Agent operates legitimately on behalf of real people, but that proximity to human intent introduces subtle new risks that traditional binary bot-or-not controls weren’t built for.

Key risks include:

Unintended Actions

While OpenAI enforces confirmation prompts and “watch mode,” governance remains your responsibility. Without policy boundaries, an agent session could move deeper into your site than intended or trigger account-level changes that a human would pause on.

Prompt-Injection and Compromised Behavior

Because the agent interprets commands, its effects are visible on your site: unwanted or unauthorized navigation, like form submissions. HUMAN AgenticTrust detects these deviations from allowed agent behavior and can automatically reject those sessions to prevent misuse.

Bypassing CAPTCHA and Light Friction

Agentic clients reproduce realistic browsing patterns and can satisfy simple visual or behavioral challenges. Early in its release, ChatGPT Agent was shown to be capable of solving simple CAPTCHA challenges. This means friction measures such as basic CAPTCHA no longer provide meaningful separation between human and automation; cryptographic identity and behavior/intent modeling are now the reliable signals.

Limited Visibility into Actions

Because the agent often acts under the user’s authenticated session, site logs can’t easily distinguish which steps were user-driven versus agent-executed. That obscures accountability and complicates forensics.

Operational load and scaling pressure

Agent-driven browsing compresses many actions into short windows. Research and comparison tasks can translate to high-density pageviews, repeated form posts, and cross-site traversals that stress rate limits and inventory controls, even when user-initiated.

Execution Drift

Even compliant agents sometimes “drift” from a user’s goal: submitting a test form, repeating a transaction, or following misleading content. These aren’t malicious, but they can create operational noise, rate-limit pressure, or false-positive fraud triggers.

Emerging systemic risk

As adoption scales, the collective effect of thousands of agent sessions, each performing small but state-changing tasks, can impose measurable infrastructure load, expose sensitive routes, or amplify errors faster than human traffic would.

What is the Business Impact of ChatGPT Agent?

ChatGPT Agent represents the early phase of agentic commerce, where AI systems act on behalf of real consumers to research, compare, and eventually purchase. 

Opportunities

When agents like ChatGPT begin driving product discovery and recommendation, inclusion becomes visibility. HUMAN’s telemetry shows that over 85% of agentic interactions are product-related, and conversions from agent-recommended results are 4.4 times higher than traditional search. Businesses that block these agents, will see none of this potential business.

Risks

Agents operate at machine speed and can amplify both configuration errors and compliance gaps. Poorly governed exposure can result in unauthorized access, data leakage, or sudden load surges as autonomous systems query your endpoints. Without trust infrastructure, legitimate opportunities can blur into abuse.

Equally, failing to accommodate verified agents risks invisibility. If trusted AI systems can’t reach or interpret your data, they will recommend competitors who can.

How to Detect ChatGPT Agent

Agentic systems like ChatGPT Agent behave more like human browsers than like traditional bots. They load pages, click buttons, and follow navigation in realistic sequences. Identifying them requires combining identity verification with behavioral context.

Identity verification through cryptographic signatures

ChatGPT Agent is one of the few automation clients that self-identifies cryptographically, a key safeguard against AI Agent Spoofing. Each request includes HTTP Message Signatures compliant with RFC 9421, carrying a Signature-Agent field set to “https://chatgpt.com” and the corresponding Signature and Signature-Input headers.

Validating these against OpenAI’s public key directory at https://chatgpt.com/.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory confirms the request originates from an authorized OpenAI agent instance.

At HUMAN, we’ve been early advocates and contributors to this standards development, releasing the HUMAN Verified AI Agent demonstration as an open-source foundation for cryptographically authenticated AI agent communication. Our team has contributed to OWASP’s guidance on agentic applications, helping establish industry standards for secure agent verification and governance.

Within HUMAN’s platform, these signatures can be recognized and allowlisted as trusted agent traffic. This ensures legitimate user-directed sessions are not blocked while unverified or spoofed automation remains contained.

Behavioral context and session analysis

While ChatGPT Agent can be verified cryptographically, identity alone doesn’t describe how it behaves once active. HUMAN’s research shows that agentic automation produces distinctive, measurable signals at the interaction layer: how it renders, navigates, and executes page events. These signals are essential for visibility and governance even when the source is trusted.

Agents typically operate through modern automation frameworks such as Playwright or Puppeteer, leaving subtle traces in JavaScript execution, resource loading, and DOM interaction. They often generate highly consistent click timing and cursor paths that are smoother and more linear than organic user behavior. They may also inject helper scripts or manifest bundled browser extensions, which appear as unique DOM or network artifacts.

Detecting these behaviors is not about disputing identity; it’s about understanding intent and impact. Even verified agents can be misused, configured incorrectly, or redirected by a malicious prompt. Behavioral telemetry lets HUMAN customers differentiate between beneficial automation and automation that creates load, extracts data, or crosses policy boundaries.

Should I block ChatGPT Agent?

Because most agents visit websites on behalf of legitimate human users, it’s important not to adopt a blanket management strategy of blocking all agent interactions. Rather, a strategy of adaptive governance should be used. The goal is not to block them outright but to recognize, govern, and shape their impact responsibly.

Identity-First Allowlisting

Verify ChatGPT Agent through its cryptographic signature. Treat verified agent sessions as trusted and observable traffic rather than potential abuse. This ensures legitimate user-directed automation continues without friction while preserving visibility and control.

Apply permissioning where it matters. Allow read-only access across public content, and require explicit policy approval for routes that change state such as checkout, login, or administrative actions. AgenticTrust enables fine-grained permissions so you can govern intent rather than block capability.

Behavioral Visibility

Verification establishes identity, but behavior defines purpose. HUMAN collects behavioral telemetry to understand how agents interact with a site and to surface anomalies that may indicate misuse or configuration errors. Use these insights to refine policy and manage business impact.

Real-time Containment

When a verified agent performs actions outside its approved intent, immediately halt the session. This ensures that trusted automation stays within defined boundaries without affecting normal operations.

Rate and Concurrency Controls

Set clear limits for search, form submission, or transaction frequency. Verified agents can perform repetitive actions quickly; pacing ensures stability and preserves availability for human visitors.

Allowlisting ChatGPT Agent with HUMAN

ChatGPT Agent can be safely managed through HUMAN’s controls rather than blocked outright. HUMAN verifies this agent’s cryptographic identity automatically—no custom signature validation or manual key management is required.

HUMAN Sightline

ChatGPT Agent is listed as a trusted AI Agent under Known Bots & Crawlers.
To allow it:

1. In your Sightline or BD console, navigate to Policies → Traffic Policy Settings → Known Bots & Crawlers.

2. Search for ChatGPT Agent.

3. Toggle the rule to ON and set the rule response to Allow.

HUMAN AgenticTrust

Within AgenticTrust, ChatGPT Agent is recognized as a trusted, cryptographically verified AI Agent. Its sessions are monitored for intent and governed by permissions. By default, it is permitted to read, log in, and make purchases.
To adjust permissions:

1. In your Sightline console, open Policies → AI Agents Permissions.

2. Search for ChatGPT Agent.

3. Grant or revoke specific permissions as needed.

Note: HUMAN performs all signature verification internally—instances of ChatGPT Agent that fail validation are automatically denied access.

Build Trust in the Agentic Era

AI agents are already reshaping how users browse and buy. With AgenticTrust, you see every agentic session, govern what each agent can do, and protect critical flows without blocking legitimate user intent.

See. Govern. Grow.

Ready to manage ChatGPT Agent on your terms? Request a demo to learn how AgenticTrust turns agent activity into trusted engagement.